The Beginner's Goodbye (20 page)

I stared at her. I felt as if heavy furniture were being moved around in my head.

“Even after we were married,” she said, “I’d have patients now and then who wore braces or splints or the like with Velcro fasteners, and they’d be undressing in a treatment room, and from my office I’d hear that ripping sound as the fasteners came apart, and I would think,
Oh!
I would think of you.”

I wanted to step closer to her but I was afraid I would scare her off. And she didn’t seem encouraging. She kept her face set toward the window, her eyes fixed on the sprinkler.

I said, “I probably did save up that barberry thorn.”

I wasn’t sure she would understand what I was referring to, so I added, “Not to make you feel bad about the L.A. trip, though. Just, maybe, subconsciously to … oh, let you know I needed you, maybe.”

Now she did look at me.

“We should have gone to Bo Brooks,” I said. “Who cares if it’s a crab house? We would have gotten all dressed up, you in the beautiful long white gown you were married in and me in my tuxedo, and we’d eat out on the deck, where everybody else was wearing tank tops and jeans. When we walked past they would stare at us, and we’d give them gracious little Queen Elizabeth waves, and they would laugh and clap. Your train would be a bit of a problem—it would catch on the splintery planking—so I’d scoop it up in my arms and carry it behind you to our table. ‘Two dozen of your jumbos and a pitcher of cold beer,’ I’d tell the
waitress once we were seated, and she’d roll out the big sheets of brown paper, and then here would come the crabs, steaming hot, dumped between us in this huge orange peppery heap.”

Dorothy still didn’t speak, but I could see that her expression was softening. She might even have been starting to smile, a little.

“The waitress would ask if we wanted bibs but we would say no, that was for tourists. And then we’d pick up our mallets and we’d be sitting there banging away like kindergarteners at Activity Hour, with bits of shell flying up and sticking to your dress and my tux, but we would just laugh; what would we care? We would just laugh and go on hammering.”

Dorothy was smiling for real now, and her face seemed to be shining. In fact she was shining all over, and growing shimmery and transparent. It was sort of like what you see when you swerve your eyes as far to the left as you can without turning your head, so you can glimpse your own profile. First your profile is there and then it’s half not there; it’s nothing but a thread of an outline. And then she was gone altogether.

9

I
never saw Dorothy again after that. I did keep an eye out, at first, but underneath I think I knew that she had left for good. Nowadays, I step into the backyard without the slightest expectation that I’ll meet her. I hoist Maeve into her toddler seat and start her gently swinging, and all I have on my mind is what a beautiful Saturday morning it is. Even this early in the day, the sunshine feels like melting liquid on my skin.

“More, Daddy! More!” Maeve says. “More” is her favorite word, which tells you a lot about her. More hugs, more songs, more tickle-game, more of the world in general. She’s one of those children who seem overjoyed to find themselves on this planet—a sturdy little blond squiggle-head with a preference for denim overalls and high-top sneakers, the better for climbing, running, rolling down hills, getting into trouble.

I have become expert at grabbing the back of the swing seat in the very center, so that, even one-handed, I can send it off perfectly straight. When it returns I push it higher by pressing a palm against the puff of denim ballooning between the slats. (Underneath her overalls, Maeve still wears diapers. Although
we’re working on that.) She bends double over the front bar and wriggles her legs ecstatically, skewing her trajectory, but I’m patient; when the swing approaches again, I grab the top slat to restart her. We have a couple of hours to fill before her mother gets home from her errands.

“Here goes,” I say, and Maeve says, “Whee!” I don’t know where she learned that. It’s a word I associate with comic strips, and she enunciates it just that precisely, so that I can almost see it printed inside a balloon above her head.

There was a time when the thought of remarriage seemed inconceivable to me. I could not wrap my mind around it. When Nandina once or twice referred to it as a possibility for my very distant future, I got a lead weight in my stomach. I felt like someone contemplating food right after a heavy meal. “Oh, that will change, by and by,” Nandina said in her all-knowing way. I just glared at her. She had no idea.

The Christmas after she and Gil got engaged, we went to Aunt Selma’s for Christmas dinner as usual, except that this year Gil came, too. And as I was driving the three of us over, Nandina just happened to drop the information that Roger and Ann-Marie would be bringing Ann-Marie’s girlfriend Louise. I cannot tell you how I dislike the word “girlfriend” when it’s used to mean the platonic female friend of a grown woman. Also, I knew perfectly well who this Louise would be. She was the famous Christmas Eve Widow, the one who could presumably have handled her husband’s death just fine if he hadn’t died just before a holiday. Ah, yes, I could see the machinery spinning here.

“This was supposed to be a
family
occasion,” I told Nandina.

“And so it is!” she said blithely.

“I would hardly call the unknown acquaintance of our first cousin’s third wife a member of the family.”

“Aaron, for mercy’s sake! It’s Christmas! It’s the time for taking in people who have no place else to go.”

“What: she’s a homeless person?”

“She’s, I don’t know. Maybe her family lives on the other side of the country. And the season has especially sad connotations for her, if you’ll recall.”

Notice the careful omission of such telltale phrases as “so much in common” or “getting you two together.” But I was no dummy. I knew.

When we arrived at Aunt Selma’s, Louise was already in place, installed at one end of the otherwise empty couch. Roger and Ann-Marie sat in armchairs, and Gil and Nandina took the love seat. So, naturally, I was settled next to Louise.

She was what I had expected, more or less: a thin, attractive young woman with a slant of short brown hair that swung artfully to one side when she tipped her head. She tipped her head often during our first few minutes together, fixing me with a bright-eyed gaze as we embarked on the usual small talk. It emerged that she was the type who prefaced even the most unexceptional statement with “Are you sitting down?”—a question I’ve always compared to laughing at your own jokes. When I asked what she did for a living, for instance: “Are you sitting down?” she said. “I’m an editor! Just like you! Only freelance.”

Her thinness was the kind that comes artificially, from dieting. You could tell somehow that she was not the weight that she was meant to be. Her knife blade of a dress had clearly been chosen
with an eye to accentuating her prominent collarbones and the two jutting knobs of her hips. I don’t know why this annoyed me. I suppose that if we’d liked each other it
wouldn’t
have annoyed me, but by now we had both arrived at that despairing stage where you realize that the other person is simply too other to bother with. Louise had stopped prettily tipping her head, and her gaze started veering sideways to conversations elsewhere in the room. I felt a strong urge to excuse myself and go home.

At dinner, she was seated on my right. (We had place cards this year, to ensure there’d be no mistakes.) However, now that she’d given up on me she addressed the bulk of her remarks to Gil, across the table. She announced to him during the soup course that she had a “very unique” relationship with clocks. “Every time I look at one, just about, you know what the time is? Nine-twelve.”

Gil said, “Ah …,” and wrinkled his forehead.

“And nine-twelve is—Are you sitting down?”

He sent a bewildered glance toward his lap.

“Nine-twelve is the day I was born!”

“Huh?”

“September twelfth! Isn’t that just eerie? It happens
way
more often than you can explain scientifically. Why, on my very first trip to London, years and years ago, of course I went to see Big Ben, and can you guess what time it was when I got there?”

Gil looked panicked.

I said, “Twelve-oh-nine?”

“What? No, my birthday is—”

“Because you were in England, after all, where they say ‘twelfth September’ instead of ‘September twelfth.’ ”

“No … actually—”

“Aaron,” Nandina broke in, “tell Louise about
Beginner’s Jet Lag
.”

“I forget,” I said.

“Aaron.”

She thought I was being difficult, but I honestly did forget. I couldn’t think of anything but the endless number of hours before I could make my escape. Till then, we had so much food to plow through. Not just the soup (cream of flour, as near as I could make out), but baked ham in an overcoat of pineapple rings, olive-drab broccoli, and mashed sweet potatoes cobbled with miniature marshmallows, followed by fruitcake for dessert along with—oh, God—a second dessert, which Louise had brought: a platter of cookies shaped like stars and bells and wreaths. I sent Nandina a “See there?” look, because one thing Nandina hated was unexpected contributions to a dinner party, but she was too mad at me to respond. The cookies were dead-white and paper-thin, dusted on top with red and green sugar. I took one for politeness’ sake and bit into it, but it had no taste. Just flat, insipid sweetness. I set it down on my plate and started praying for coffee. Not that I planned to drink any at such an hour, but coffee would signal the end of this interminable meal. It was already late afternoon, and a dull gray twilight furred the corners of the dining room.

In the car as I was driving us home, Nandina gave me a thorough scolding. “Why you can’t behave with plain old common garden-variety civility …” she told me. She was sitting in the rear, and she leaned so far forward to berate me that her chin was all but resting on the back of my seat. “You were literally looking down your nose at that poor woman!”

“Yes,” I said, “and she was looking down
her
nose. Face it, Nandina, we were oil and water. Imagine, a professional editor saying something was ‘very unique’!”

“Oh, well, she’s only freelance,” Nandina said in a milder tone.

Then Gil said, “Anyhow,” and asked me if the fog was making driving difficult. He always looked unhappy when Nandina and I quarreled.

I dropped them off at Nandina’s with the briefest of goodbyes and drove on. Back home, I changed into comfortable clothes, poured myself a drink, and sat down to read, but I couldn’t seem to concentrate. I felt too depressed; I wasn’t sure exactly why. Here I’d been longing for home ever since we’d arrived at Aunt Selma’s, so shouldn’t I feel relieved now?

It occurred to me that secretly, in the murky depths of my subconscious, I had been hoping that Louise and I would like each other.

Between Christmas and New Year’s, we closed the office and Nandina went into high gear with the wedding preparations. She accomplished it all in a week: pretty efficient, I
will
say. The ceremony took place on the last day of the year at my parents’ old church, which Nandina still attended. I gave her away; her best friend from junior high was matron of honor; Gil’s cousin served as best man. The only guests were Aunt Selma and her family, and Gil’s three sisters and
their
families, and the Woolcott Publishing staff. Afterward, we held a modest reception at my house, although I didn’t have much to do with it. Peggy and the matron of honor saw to the food, and Irene did the decorating, and Roger took charge of the drinks. I was just an innocent bystander.

Then Gil and Nandina went away for a week to the Eastern Shore, which seemed a strange choice in midwinter, but to each his own, I guess. This was traditionally a slow time at the office, so it was no problem doing without Nandina to boss us around. I was editing a new vanity title,
Why I Have Decided to Go On Living
, written by a high-school English teacher. Basically, it was a laundry list of “inspirational” moments, such as
Watching the sky turn orange at night behind the Domino Sugars sign
. I would read choice bits aloud to the others in the outer office.
“Feeling a new baby curl its hand around my index finger,”
I’d call out, and Charles would grunt and Irene would give an absentminded “Sss!” and Peggy would say, “Aww. Well, that
is
a good reason!” They were all so predictable.

Irene flipped through thick magazines that appeared to feature nothing but cosmetics ads. Charles got on the phone and monitored what sounded like very heated quarrels among his daughters, who were still on school holiday while both parents were back at work. Peggy decided to practice touch-typing her numerals and symbols; she said she’d never made it past the standard alphabet keys.

At noon on our last day of freedom, so to speak, we all went out together to the Gobble-Up Café, leaving the office unattended, which theoretically we should not have done, and we ordered wine with lunch, which we almost never did. The Gobble-Up was so unaccustomed to serving alcohol that the wine list read, in its entirety,
Chardonnay $5, Merlot $5, Rosé $4
, and when I asked the waitress, “What is your Merlot?” she said, “It’s a red wine?”

I ordered a glass anyway, and the women ordered Chardonnay, and Charles had a beer. Peggy got a bit tipsy on only two sips and told all of us that she thought of us as family. Irene
announced that, what the hell, after lunch she was taking off for Nordstrom’s winter-coat sale. Charles answered a cell-phone call, contrary to the posted house rules, and waited way too long before he stepped outside, murmuring, “Now, calm down; slow down; you know I can’t understand a word when you’re crying.” And I picked up the whole check, which probably means I was feeling fairly merry myself.

Walking back to the office (bypassing Charles, still on his phone out front), I told Peggy and Irene how unreasonably Nandina had behaved after Christmas dinner. I think that, in my winy flush of good feeling, I imagined that they would express some indignation on my behalf. “She basically ambushes me,” I said, “she and Ann-Marie; plunks me next to this woman I have nothing to say to, zero—”